From South to West: The Aesthetic Revolution of Bertina Lopes

The first lecture of the series was an online event. Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, Mozambican-Portuguese artist Bertina Lopes (1924-2012) developed a revolutionary and political practice of painting that bridged cultures and borders. This paper explores how Lopes brought a distinct stylistic and iconographic vision of art “from the south of the world to the west,” to create a singular body of work rooted in her own political activism and social criticism, which challenged the Western perspectives of European avant-gardes.